Today's search systems are well efficient for processing requests for one type of items. In the travel industry field, search engines are now widely used and return travel solutions are sent in reply to an end user request. This is the case for engines dedicated to the airline industry such as low fare search engines providing the user with a set of low price flight solutions to be displayed on a friendly graphical interface.
The success of these techniques led the industry to propose computerized tools for enlarging the scope of the searches, for returning packages of products. This is particularly the case in the travel industry where the customer often needs a bundle of services when traveling. Products to be packaged can include flight tickets, hotel nights, and tourism activities.
FIG. 1 depicts how a state-of-the-art technique builds product packages. A plurality of data repositories Da, Db and Dc are used and each stores travel products of one type. By way of example, Da, Db and Dc respectively contain information about air seats, about hotel rooms and about car rental services. A server S is used as a central node of the system. It receives user requests and returns travel packages solutions from end users over a network such as a wide area network preferably the internet. Upon receipt of a request, the server S communicates a plurality of individual queries each targeting one search engine Ea, Eb, Ec respectively associated with one of the repositories Da, Db, Dc. Local and independent searches are performed at the level of the search engines Ea, Eb, Ec and products are returned to the server S. The later server then aggregates the products to construct travel packages made of a plurality of products.
Such a search system is complex and involves multiple hardware/software computer resources.